Control Chauvet Hurricane 1301 with external relay and arduino

I bought a Chauvet Hurricane 1301 for its massive smoke output: my aim is to build a low-cost but extremely effective security and anti theft smoke shield and fog bandit clone, by using nothing more than your average disco fog machine… well, at least a renowned powerful fog machine at that. The specs about the consumption are pretty much the same: 1200W nominal power, and about 50W average when turned on to keep the temperature of the liquid constant. What this system lacks, is the “stamina” that professional systems have, since it won’t fill a room with only the first burst of smoke, but it’s not that much delay between the first puff and the second, and you still get the surprise effect. Ideal for not-so-big rooms.

But you may want to use it to spray smoke when certain events happen, like music timed puffs, or pressure plates, you name it.

There is no immediate way to do it: the wired remote doesn’t provide simple short contacts: none of the pins get shorted when you press the “manual” button there, so it must be a powered remote that sends out powered signals.

Solution: catch the short contact given by the manual switch on the machine’s rear panel.

Open your Hurricane 1301 by removing the clearly visible screws on the sides and on top, this is the electronics board where the cables from the button and DIN plugs in the rear end; here I had plugged two jumper cables in the switch plug, I just pushed them on the side of the female connectors inside the plastic plug

Pull the cables behind the board to get them out from the tank housing.

Here you see where I made the jumper cables come out from. Since that hole is where the tank’s bulge protrudes to stabilize it, you won’t be able to use large cables (not that you need to anyway) otherwise you won’t be able to fit the tank.

Since I had really short jumper cables, I ended up using 6 of them (!) plugged together, and placed a zip tie in the grill to fix them onto the chassis.

After you close everything, you now have an outlet you can connect to a relay, regulaed for example by an arduino.

So what about my homemade smoke shield clone system? I just need to find an alarm sensor to wire up to an arduino, to which will be also wired a relay going to the Hurricane 1301.